The present invention relates to a method for processing sensor information in a vehicle, and a corresponding method for controlling a vehicle, wherein sensor data are transformed and transferred to a curved coordinate system. The present invention further relates to a vehicle with a central control unit for performing the method according to the invention.
The following discussion of related art is provided to assist the reader in understanding the advantages of the invention, and is not to be construed as an admission that this related art is prior art to this invention.
For automatic control and driver assistance through automated vehicle control systems, information about a current environment of a particular vehicle is required. To adapt specific components of the vehicle, such as the suspension, brakes or steering to the current environment of the vehicle and to avoid faulty controls, e.g. due to environmental effects, calculations for controlling the vehicle systems must be continuously adjusted to a current situation or environment of the respective vehicle.
To interpret respective sensor data, provided for example by a laser, radar, camera, time of flight sensor, or any other technically suitable sensor for detecting a current environment of a vehicle, and to use these sensor data for controlling vehicle components, the sensor data need to be transformed and associated with the current environment of the vehicle.
Approaches are being pursued in the prior art, which require a fixed Cartesian orientation of a respective coordinate system so that discretization is always carried out along two orthogonal linear axes. Chassis systems, however, usually need information about the street level along a future roadway. Such roadway is usually curved and thus not always a straight line. To account for a curved road, the prior art attempts to extract relevant information for respective chassis functions or for assistance systems from respective data of a coordinate system along a respective curved route. However, such approaches require an increased computational complexity and associated precision errors when converting a quantized linear grid into a curved representation, for example, during an extraction step.
It would therefore be desirable and advantageous to obviate prior art shortcomings and to provide an improved method for processing sensor information with a vehicle, wherein sensor data of a current environment of the vehicle and determined with at least one sensor encompassed by the vehicle are transformed and are entered in a curved coordinate system. A curved coordinate system in the context of the presented invention is defined as a coordinate system which is diffeomorphic to Cartesian coordinates. In particular, a curved coordinate system is defined as a polar, cylindrical, or spherical coordinate system.